The historian Jacques Barzun once remarked that anyone who wanted to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball. Well, here's an opportunity to do so, although the learning curveball (sorry, Gould's style is infectious) may prove steep for those not already familiar with the basics of the game. "We have measures and indices for everything imaginable, from simple lists of at-bats to number of times a black shortstop under six feet tall has been caught stealing third on pitchouts by righties to left-handed catchers." If you find this sentence incomprehensible, you might want to warm up with Joe Morgan's excellent Baseball for Dummies .

The late Stephen Jay Gould is best remembered as a palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist who sought to explain - it being both impossible and unnecessary to justify - the ways of Darwinism to men, but he was also a lifetime fan of the New York Yankees, the team that the rest of the country loves to loathe, and a mind-numbingly well-informed baseball anorak.

Despite superficial father-and-son similarities to Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, this book is not a developing and structured narrative but a compilation of essays, reviews and op-ed pieces that Gould wrote in the last 20 years of his life, collected by him during his final illness at the behest of his friend and fellow baseball fanatic Stephen King. Perhaps as a result of the author's untimely death, it has been either sloppily or too respectfully edited, resulting in numerous repetitions and redundancies that can make Gould sound rather like a classic sports bar bore. There came a point where I felt that if he mentioned once more that his son Ethan rooted for the notoriously "jinxed" Boston Red Sox, that Joe DiMaggio had once signed a ball caught in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium by his immigrant father, or that Jane Austen referred to baseball in Northanger Abbey, I would scream. (The latter is in any case a trivially late reference to the game's English origins: "I have seen Morris-dancing, cudgel-playing, baseball and cricketts and many other sports on the Lord's Day," complained a Kentish divine under Cromwell's Protectorate.)

The individual pieces are themselves brief, breezy and fun to read, despite occasional eruptions of the prolix and slightly pompous tone that also marred Gould's later science writing. In a knowingly self-indulgent and mock-pedantic way, Gould also applies his professional skills in the field of evolution to such topics as the origins of the game and the question of why no batters hit .400 any more.

In short, Gould reveals himself to be a facile explicator but by no means the deep or interesting thinker that he evidently aspired to be, as his frequent analogies to the field of classical music embarrassingly illustrate. Nevetheless this is an important publishing event, if only as a cultural marker of the way we live now. If Richard Dawkins were to write a book about his love of cricket in general and passionate support of Surrey CCC in particular, you would need to believe in the "all possible worlds" theory to imagine one in which it stood a chance of getting published in America. They just don't care about us guys the way we care about them.

Norman Mailer's 1967 novella Why Are We in Vietnam? proposed that the answer to his title question was American males' obsession with hunting. It might be equally tendentious to suggest that the reason the US is in Iraq is because of its obsession with a game in which no match lasts longer than a few hours and always produces a clear result, the condition of the ball and the ground is of zero relevance, where "errors" are "called" but a game can be "perfect", the skills of batters are never tested in a developing long-term confrontation, and the winner of the World Series is always American.

One thing is for sure: George W Bush, former owner of the Texas Rangers, agreed to run for political office only because in 1992 he failed to get the plum job he really coveted, as major league commissioner of baseball. Which just leaves the question of why we are in Iraq, but then we all know the answer to that.